


Moments When We Are Someone Else

by Morgyn Leri (morgynleri)



Category: Torchwood
Genre: F/M, GFY
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-02
Updated: 2012-12-02
Packaged: 2017-11-20 01:52:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 912
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/579997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morgynleri/pseuds/Morgyn%20Leri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was gone in the morning, but there was still a lingering feeling of sympathy - empathy, though from where he didn't know. A snatch of unfamiliar perfume, sweet and light, clung to the sheets where she'd held him as he clung to her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Moments When We Are Someone Else

**Author's Note:**

> A series of almost-drabbles, skipping merrily through the episodes starting with "Cyberwoman" and ending with "Exit Wounds".

The first time he wasn't sure how to react. He didn't expect anything but contempt from any of them, and when she'd shown up at his door with a bottle of cheap wine and a small, brittle smile, he'd stood staring for a long moment.

She was gone in the morning, but there was still a lingering feeling of sympathy - empathy, though from where he didn't know. A snatch of unfamiliar perfume, sweet and light, clung to the sheets where she'd held him as he clung to her.

He returned to work a week later, neither saying a word.

* * *

She drove him home after the incident with the cannibals, and invited herself in without asking. Saying only that he shouldn't be alone. Neither should she, he read between the lines, and asked her where she wanted to eat breakfast in the morning.

They were careful with each other, both still littered with the bruises and cuts from their trip out to the countryside. She murmured words he couldn't understand, and didn't say anything when Lisa's name slipped out at the wrong moment.

She was still pressed against his side when he woke up in the morning.

* * *

He took her back to her flat after Mary was gone, after she'd talked to Jack about the amulet. She asked him to order in dinner, that they ate sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall.

She dragged the duvet onto the floor that night, and whispered a single word into his shoulder as she came, clinging tightly. He ignored that it was someone else's name, his lip bloody from biting back Lisa's name.

It wasn't healthy, this, for either of them, but neither said anything. Contenting themselves with the knowledge that they were aware of where they were broken.

* * *

A new car for him, and a new flat for her in one week, and they spent a night celebrating and mourning with a couple bottles of cheap wine and a six-pack of more expensive beer, and a night spent on the new futon she'd bought along with the flat.

She asked him about Jack, he evaded giving her details, and took a taxi back to his flat. Seeing the light on under the door, he spun back around, and spent the night walking the streets instead.

A small bag of his favorite coffee was an apology that he accepted, taking her a cup of her favorite tea.

* * *

When the Rift took her and Jack, he wanted to agree with Owen that their only chance to get them back was to open the Rift, but he doubted she would thank him for doing so if they didn't have all the equations right. Not a reason to reveal to Owen, not that it was any better to say anything about Jack.

He wasn't sure which one of them he was more glad to see come back through, even at the price of destabilizing the Rift.

The nights Jack lay in the morgue, Ianto spent at her flat, simply clinging.

* * *

It was her turn to cling after Tommy returned to 1914, quiet tears soaking into his shirt, hands urgent and desperate, words whispered in the dark, a plea to make her feel something.

They were both in early the next morning, only Jack there to notice the small smile she gave him, the carefully prepared cup of tea he brought her. Ianto met his gaze, asking without words if Jack was going to object to what they had.

Jack just smiled, and asked him what it took to get treatment like that.

* * *

They didn't even make it back to either flat when Owen was shot. Sitting on the couch, his arm wrapped around her and her face buried in his shoulder. Gwen looked puzzled, Martha unsurprised, and Jack didn't even stay still long enough to actually notice.

When Owen was brought back, he bought the alcohol this time, and between cheap whiskey and fevered caresses, they forgot exactly what they were trying to forget, and just remembered the understanding between them.

It was impossible to forget in the morning, when he was trying to teach Owen how to not break the coffee machine while keeping a pounding headache from the others.

* * *

He's worried more for her than himself when Gray shuts him and Gwen and Hart in with the Weevils. Worries that are justified when they get upstairs, and she's bleeding out on the floor of the autopsy bay. Crying because she couldn't save Owen.

It's his job to prepare her body for the vaults, or at least, he won't let someone else take that job. And then shutting down her station, closing out her access to the mainframe. There's her goodbye message, and he ignores the twist in his gut.

After all, they never really had anything more than friendship and a few nights when everything got just too much. He had to tell himself that, keep himself from believing anything else.

And when her work, her time-bubble, stops the Dalek from destroying him and Gwen and the Hub, he smiles to himself. Never mind the gunshot wound, the body in the morgue, there's always something of her around. And that more than anything is a comfort.

So he mourns, and he moves on, and if he remembers those nights as being maybe a little more romantic, a little more important than they'd been at the time, there's no one who will tell him it's wrong.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted 6 December 2008 on rounds_of_kink at LiveJournal.


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